Kevin Brockmeier
Nothing Is Quite What We Imagine It to Be: A Conversation with Kevin Brockmeier
interviewed by C. Connor Syrewicz
Kevin Brockmeier’s latest book The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories is a “compendium of one hundred ghost stories” that “discovers new ways of looking at who we are and what matters to us, exploring how mysterious, sad, strange, and comical it is to be alive—or, as it happens, not to be.”
It was published by Penguin/ Random House in March of 2021. It can be ordered here.
Connor: It often occurs to me that writing is sometimes just an excuse for people to spend a long time thinking about the kinds of things they like to think about. Writers sometimes write books as an excuse to spend a long time thinking about the kinds of subjects they find interesting; literary critics sometimes write long, complex interpretations as an excuse to spend a long time thinking about the books that they find moving; fans sometimes develop elaborate theories about their favorite novels as an excuse to spend a long time thinking about their favorite fictional worlds; and so on. Last year, in a conversation with Karen Russell, you said that in writing The Ghost Variations, you were “setting out after pleasure, fun,” so was The Ghost Variations something of an excuse to spend a long time thinking about ghosts? And if so, what is it about ghosts that made you want to spend a long time thinking about them?
Kevin: For me, the fun of the project was formal above all else: I wanted to spend a long time conceiving of stories in two-page increments. As a reader, I’ve found that the swiftness of stories like these, even when the material itself is sober, heartbroken, or desolate, has an element of play about it. Reading them feels to me like an act of recreation. I thought that imagining them would, too. But after that, yes, the fun for me was conceptual. Some of the stories in the book are frightening, others sad or a little ruthless, but as an object of contemplation ghosts don’t seem innately sad or frightening or ruthless to me—they seem invigorating. The book has many tones, I think, but when I imagine a ghost, the first thing I picture isn’t some wraith moaning for blood; it’s probably not even a ghost; it’s a ghost sticker. I think the book offers something of the small pleasures of an object such as that, all bright colors and sharp outlines. Certainly the illustrations do. It also turned out to present the same excuse that every book does—an excuse, as you say, to spend a long time thinking about some of my other obsessions: animals, alternate models of time, luck and the lack of it, numbers and letters, etc.
Connor: Ghost stickers! I love that image! It makes me imagine a kid’s notebook covered in stickers of ghost-aliens and ghost-elephants and ghost-parakeets. That is a wonderful description of your book: a hundred fun and thoughtful and surprising variations on a central theme. You said a lot of great things about ghosts in that answer, and I’d like to return to that subject, but for now, I’d like to stay on the topic of form. I know that writing flash fiction was new to you as you started this book. What drew you to the flash-fiction form? And how did the writing process differ from writing in a form with which you are more familiar?
Kevin: My reading life guides my writing life. That’s always been the case, and it was doubly the case with The Ghost Variations. I believe that the best reading is essentially hedonistic: you should read widely but allow yourself to be guided toward whatever delights and invigorates you. Lately, so many of the reading encounters that have actually delighted and invigorated me have been in the very short form: Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Ana Maria Shua, Alex Epstein, Giorgio Manganelli, Sandra Petrignani, Joanna Walsh—writers like that. Discovering this work, I felt the same way I did discovering alternative music when I was fifteen: as if there was a whole different spectrum of colors out there, colors I hadn’t even known were available to be seen. As a writer, I’ve always been an incrementalist, moving slowly from sentence to sentence, trusting each one to dictate the one that comes next. Nothing about writing flash changed that for me. Years ago, though, I had an editor tell me that there are writers who end up reducing what they initially think of as their final draft into its ultimate best form, and there are writers who end up expanding what they initially think of as their final draft into its ultimate best form. It seemed to him, he said, that I was the latter: an expander. Creating flash—and particularly a collection of flash whose length constraints were so consistent and so rigorous—required me to become the other kind of writer: a reducer. It’s fairly easy to adapt a pattern-based flash story to a single manuscript page: you either extend the pattern or you diminish it, depending on what’s necessary. Many of the stories in this book aren’t pattern-based, though. They’re narratives, classic narratives, albeit very short. I often found, when I was writing those kinds of stories, that I had exceeded the length restriction I had set for myself. When I did, I had to find ways of homing in on a detail or a plot point or the pulsing or capsizing heart of a character—or the pulsing or capsizing brain; or the pulsing or capsizing metaphysical dilemma—rather than meandering toward it or approaching it sideways. I also had to grow accustomed to writing stories that were almost all beginning and ending, with very little middle.
Connor: One of the things that I love about this book is that the stories within it don’t only focus on the pulsing or capsizing of the human heart but also on the pulsing and capsizing of so many things: as you said, the brain and metaphysical dilemmas but also animals, aliens, the weather, time, death. I am reminded of one of my favorite stories in the book, “Things That Fall from the Sky,” in which your narrator follows the pulsing and capsizing of a city after a “rain of ghosts.” That story ends with words that struck me as some of the Brockmeier-est of the book: that the people of the city “lived out their days with a sense of expansiveness and reverent mystery, nourished by this world and also by some other.” It seems to me that so much of your writing is nourished by this world and also by some other, and this raises a question for me: What draws you back to this space between our world and another? And was it helpful to be working in a somewhat familiar thematic territory given that you were simultaneously working in a somewhat unfamiliar formal territory?
Kevin: You’ve singled out one of the most optimistic stories in the collection. So many of the book’s stories expose the characters (or the readers) to embarrassment, exhaustion, dismay, or outright horror—or imprison them in little finger traps of language or logic that tighten around them the second they try to extract themselves—that I made the decision to bend the material in that particular story and a few of the others explicitly toward comfort, light, benediction. I was trying to balance out the book’s emotional tones. In any case, you’re right: my whole writing life, I’ve been attracted to the speculative between-spaces of fantasy, metaphysics, and religion (though I tend to see the latter two as subcategories of the first). Originally I wrote about those spaces for no other reason than that I found them, well, fun; even when I was envisioning stories that were dark, apocalyptic, or saturated in pain, the some-other-worldness of them invigorated my imagination. I’m still attracted to those spaces, still delighted by them, but lately I feel as if my understanding of their value has begun to shift. I think that it’s healthy to embrace your obsessions as a writer—much better to embrace them than to resist them—but eventually, unless your relationship with those obsessions deepens, you run the risk of cheapening them. Sooner or later you’re faced with a choice: either you abandon your obsessions, you reenvision them, or you exhaust them. Pauline Kael described exhausting them as “taking the familiar Hollywood course—making tricks out of what was once done for love.” I’d rather not write at all than begin making tricks. What I seem to be doing instead is reenvisioning my obsessions. Sometimes, when my mind wanders, I overhear myself making the argument that the fantastic isn’t ornamental, isn’t just a coating that certain writers like to apply to experience, but is right at the center of it. Too much fiction, nearly all of it, behaves as if the world is ordinary or makes sense. I don’t think it is, or that it does. And I don’t know why fiction should pretend otherwise. Why there is something rather than nothing is the kind of question that people like to dismiss as undergraduate dorm-room talk, and maybe it often is, but I feel as if some part of me—of everyone—is asking exactly that question all the time. The world could so easily be some other way, or no way at all, and sustaining that fact in your mind gives reality and all its mundane details the quality of a light-show projected on tissue. It’s all so unnecessary, but numinously unnecessary; meaningfully unnecessary, I want to say, though whether there’s any actual meaning to be found there, who knows? I don’t know why more literature isn’t about exactly that. It’s possible for fiction to address the feeling I’m talking about directly (The Other City by Michal Ajvaz is one book that does so; Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is another), but fantasy provides a way of approaching it at an angle, simply by stimulating our awareness that nothing is quite what we imagine it to be. Paul Valéry said, “There is another world, and it is this one.” Part of what I wanted to do with The Ghost Variations was allow myself to indulge that sensation, to say something about the aura of holy dispensability that everything seems to possess, which, no matter how rarely fiction addresses it, strikes me as not just human but foundationally human.
Connor: Wow! There is so much in that answer, I almost don't know how to start responding to it. First off, I love how you have been describing writing as an activity that is guided by joy, pleasure, fun, obsession, and indulgence. It feels incredibly refreshing to encounter a point of view that does not treat pleasure as somehow opposed to depth and significance. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the sense I get from your answer is that the “obsessive” impulse to explore “between-spaces” in your writing has been with you for some time but that this impulse has begun to take on a greater depth or maybe a different kind of meaning than it once had. I find myself incredibly moved at the idea that something—maybe all things—can be “meaningfully unnecessary” or have a “holy dispensability,” and so I’m curious if you could say a little bit more about how The Ghost Variations is an expression of this idea. And I’m wondering if you could say more about how exploring dispensability has been significant for you. What meaning, in other words, have you found in meaninglessness?
Kevin: You’ve articulated my attraction to between-spaces—and how that attraction has changed or started to vibrate recently—very nicely. I’ll make one small clarification: There’s a difference between the certainty that there is no meaning and the uncertainty that there is. It’s not that I’m wedded to the meaninglessness of everything. The uncertainty—that’s what I embrace. Whether I bring it to my fiction is an open question, though I wouldn’t be surprised to hear you tell me that I do. Anyway, serendipitously, I happened to be reading a book by Ermanno Cavazzoni today called Brief Lives of Idiots. All of Cavazzoni’s idiots, he says, see the beauty of living without seeing the sense of living. He seems to admire them for that. Maybe I can borrow his distinction and say that, for me at least, things don’t have to be useful or meaningful or necessary—don’t have to make sense—in order to be beautiful. They can be beautiful for no reason at all: a good thing, since, for me, perceiving reason or meaning is a gesture rather than a claim, something that is, or should be, modest, exploratory, iffy. The Ghost Variations consists of a hundred entirely separate stories. Because those stories are so entirely separate, the book keeps altering its stance toward meaning. It proposes answers to the deep questions of being—this is how time works, this is how death works, this is how love works, this is how pain works, this is what souls are, this is what individuals are, this is what the past looks like, this is what the future looks like, this is what stays and this is what doesn’t, this is what matters and this is what doesn’t, and this is whether we do or we don’t—not because it sees the answers it offers as necessary or correct but because it’s tickled to be thinking up answers. It’s a book that’s designed to explore a meaning and then dispose of it, adopting it wholeheartedly but only for an instant. (I can imagine a God who works the same way, a squirrel of a God leaping from branch to branch, so that everything has its turn to shake with meaning but not for very long.) Some of the stories in The Ghost Variations, not all of them, take that kind of ephemerality as their explicit subject, but even when they don’t, the book as a whole, simply because of its structure, might be an exercise in the kind of dispensability we’re talking about: it asks you to hand yourself over to a two-page story, complete with its little interior lightshow of metaphysics, and then to set it aside so that you can hand yourself over to the next.
Connor: Your answer is actually calling to mind two very different thoughts at once. On the one hand, I can’t tell you how invigorating it is to hear someone affirm the significance of beauty, frivolity, and fun after a year (in fact, a few years) that was anything but beautiful, frivolous, and fun. But before I pursue that thought about timeliness, I think I’d like to ask you about the second thought that comes to mind which, once again, has to do with ghosts. As you talk about how this book’s structure is an exercise in dispensability, it occurs to me how incredibly appropriate it is that you chose the subject of ghosts as an organizing theme precisely because ghosts are so incredibly indispensable, in the sense that they are that part of us that does not die even as the body perishes. In other words, it would appear that your book is almost enacting the very in-between-ness and uncertainty that we’ve been discussing: one-hundred dispensable variations about that indispensable part of the human spirit. Earlier, you mentioned that when you think of ghosts, you tend not to think of the horror trope but of something much more (apparently) dispensable: ghost stickers. So where does the theme of ghosts fit into your thinking about uncertainty and dispensability?
Kevin: Maybe I can answer by proposing a distinction between souls and spirits? In certain realms of thought, the soul is our immaterial component, the body our material component, and the spirit the cord that joins them. In other words, we possess two features of being that are nonphysical yet nonidentical: the soul, which is indispensable, and the spirit, which is dispensable. This idea isn’t original to me. I don’t know quite where it originated, though. I heard some version of it roughly twenty-five years ago from a student of mine in an English composition class. Anyway, one of my own theories (a narrative theory, not a philosophical one) is that a ghost is what results when a spirit, which is not meant to outlast the life of a body, does. It’s a cord that doesn’t realize it’s no longer attached to anything. Now, the book fudges all of these distinctions. It’s not faithful to any one definition of ghosts. It does not maintain a consistent attitude toward the afterlife. And it’s not even committed to the difference between dispensability and indispensability, since some of the stories explore what it means when the things that are not meant to last do—like the moment of humiliation that keeps repeating itself in the book’s very first story, “A Notable Social Event”—and others what it means when the things that are meant to last forever don’t—like, oh, the difference between ghosts and babies, say, in “A Source of Confusion.” The book suggests that we don’t really know what’s permanent and what’s impermanent. And yet, acknowledging that I’m probably a bundle of contradictions, if I had to share my own actual instinct regarding permanence and necessity—not what I know, just what I suspect—I would say that while nothing had to be, everything that is is forever. I’m sure that this attitude has filtered into the book, since more than anything else I’ve written, these stories gave me the chance to indulge my taste for metaphysics (or ’pataphysics, really, since the book’s attitude toward ultimate truth is comic and contingent rather than rigorous or logical or sober—though maybe I should say that it treats rigor, logic, and sobriety as subjects for comedy and contingency, which seems closer to the truth).
Connor: I’ve never heard that distinction between souls and spirits before, but I love it. And I’m so glad that you found a vehicle that allowed you to indulge your taste for metaphysics because I think that’s what I enjoy so much about these stories: the form and the storytelling has such a lightness to it, but the themes that animate them often carry such metaphysical weight. But that word—indulge—brings me back to the thought I was having before. Throughout our conversation, you have been speaking about hedonism and pleasure and fun. And as I said before, I appreciate how you seem to see those concepts as compatible with weight and depth and significance. As you well know, between COVID, the Trump Presidency, the death of George Floyd and many other people of color at the hands of police, the attacks on our AAPI community, and so many other horrible events, we have just been through an incredibly weighty couple of years. As hard as that has been, it strikes me that running away from all that weightiness would be to abandon our responsibility to care for each other and (most importantly) for those who are struggling and suffering. But on the other hand, I and (I assume) many others are hungry for some frivolity and fun after such an incredibly taxing couple of years. So what do you think is the significance of pleasure and fun in these incredibly weighty times? And how do you think we can recapture some of it without sacrificing or forgetting all of those weighty events that have defined these last few years?
Kevin: Someone asked me recently which of my own books I would choose to live inside, and my first thought was, Uh-oh. So many of them are soaked in pain and illness, or in difficulty, or in heartache, or else wedded to various structural rigors that would surely be as maddening to occupy as they were to devise. They care (or at least often they do) about fantasy, and they care (probably always) about beauty, but they’re not escapist. The Ghost Variations isn’t exactly an escapist book, either, since no matter how playful its impulses, it keeps transforming the world into an unsolvable little ontological puzzle, and it’s filled with characters who face one of two profound problems: the problem of haunting or the problem of being haunted. It’s definitely a book I would choose to read, and I do hope that it’s fun to read, but actually to inhabit? Maybe that will be my next book. Anyway, your question has me thinking about the complaint George Orwell leveled against J. M. Barrie for writing his Peter Pan books. Orwell felt that Barrie had abdicated his responsibilities as an artist by losing himself in nostalgia and escapism at a time when the political necessities of the moment were so grave. Now, Orwell is an important writer to me—an important essayist, in particular—and Barrie isn’t, but it does seem to me that someone here is making an argument for narrowing the domain of art, and thereby narrowing the range of human possibility, and it isn’t Barrie. The world we’ve inherited would be poorer without Peter Pan, just as it would without Nineteen Eighty-Four. Of course I’m like everyone else: there are books that are to my taste and books that aren’t, subjects that are to my taste and subjects that aren’t, styles that are to my taste and styles that aren’t. But the claim I would make on behalf of fiction that it should be a place of wide-open expanses and endless variety. I suppose that if I were the king of publishing, I would strike all careless prose from print, but that would be my only decree. There’s a Salman Rushdie review of Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler that I’ve always remembered; I think I read it, in fact, before I had read Calvino himself. Rushdie argues against the accusation that Calvino’s fiction isn’t important because he’s just “a word-juggler, a fantasist,” and he ends by saying something that resonated with me: that “the reason why Calvino is such an indispensable writer is precisely that he tells us, joyfully, wickedly, that there are things in the world worth loving as well as hating; and that such things exist in people, too.” That’s not the only significance of pleasure, but surely it’s one of them. You can make a sound political argument that there are times when art needs to forego joy, when its aims should be revealing the things that are worth hating instead of worth loving, but surely the end goal of politics or activism—at least any politics or activism to which I’d be willing to subscribe—should be expanding rather than reducing the amount of pleasure that’s available in the world, and to whom.
Connor: That’s absolutely lovely. I couldn’t agree more about pleasure as a political principle—though all of this raises an interesting question for me about pleasure’s role in the life of a writer. Correct me if I’m wrong, but throughout our conversation, you’ve seemed to suggest that pleasure and indulgence are important parts of your writing process. It seems to me that, as a general principle, it’s a good idea for writers to play and to have fun and to approach their work with a sense of passionate, excited joy. But what would you say to the writer whose obsessions are a bit strange, a bit idiosyncratic, a bit hard for most readers to “get”? I imagine that it would be easy to say something like, “Some people’s idiosyncratic obsessions eventually become accepted, so just go for it!” And that may even be a right answer to this conundrum. But I’d guess that for every idiosyncratic artist who becomes recognized as a genius, about a thousand more are forgotten. So what do you think is the right balance between self-indulgence and compromise for an artist whose obsessions are just a little bit baffling to most potential readers?
Kevin: I’ve thought a lot about this question, both as a teacher and as a writer, and I’m nowhere close to feeling I’ve figured it out, so if it seems that I’m bounding confidently off toward an answer, I hope you’ll perceive the actual spirit in which I’m offering one: on tiptoes. What you’re asking about is the difference between writing as a mercenary activity and writing as an artistic activity. When it comes to this binary, I always want to argue in favor of art. Maybe the least valuable piece of advice I received from any of my MFA teachers was “Now you need to write something that's you but not so much you.” This was well-intended, and I’ve never forgotten it, but you would be hard-pressed to have come up with a suggestion that was likelier to activate my not-gonna reflex. That was 25 years ago. I don’t know that my own writing has been tempered by time, but it’s certainly been altered by it, and the biggest reason for that is that I’ve done so much reading since then, and I’ve kept making new discoveries that excited me. I think your work is bound to be in conversation with the books you love. If none of the books you love are broadly accessible, then I don’t see how you can expect your own books to be, not without turning yourself to wood with the effort, but most readers have diverse tastes. I’ve read everything that’s available in English, for instance, by Gonçalo Tavares and Éric Chevillard and Yan Ge, all of whom are certainly obscure to American readers and fairly obscure in their home countries, too, but my favorite book of 2020 was Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, which was widely read, and I love Gabriel García Márquez and Marilynne Robinson and Henning Mankell, and I’m devoted to the books of Walter Tevis, who forty years after he died is suddenly a best-selling novelist thanks to the adaptation of The Queen’s Gambit. My point is that it’s possible to recognize that you possess multiple possible creative gravities and, if you wish, you can allow one gravity to be modified by another, a gravity that lots of readers share with you. That might be the most honest way to reach a wider audience, and it’s probably the most practical: Take the conversation you're having with a writer you’re almost alone in adoring and allow someone else to join it, a writer you adore along with everybody else—not just Olga Ravn, say, but Olga Ravn plus E. M. Forster. That said, John Banville asserted somewhere that every writer who’s worth anything has about 2,000 readers. (It took some searching, but I found the source.) And Anuk Arudpragasm compares writers of real merit to the Tzadikim, the 36 holy individuals for whose sake God keeps the world running and who go unrecognized for what they are even by themselves. “I do believe there is great writing (almost all of it, I feel sure, written in languages other than English and the major European languages), but I feel it will never be given full recognition,” says Arudpragasm, “and that I will never have the fortune of coming across it.” (I already had this one bookmarked.) I think that both Banville and Arudpragasm are probably closer to right than to wrong.
Connor: I really appreciate that answer, as I think that it’s the right one, but I also appreciate the tiptoes because it’s a question that continues to vex me as well. As a teacher, I've been turning my attention away from teaching my students how to write “good” texts, and I’ve been trying to think about how to teach students to perform the activity of writing more effectively. Having high levels of intrinsic motivation, for example, has been found to increase creativity, so one question I’ve been asking myself is, “How can I teach my students to write with higher levels of intrinsic motivation?” In my experience, professional writers often can’t really say why they write well and why someone else does not by comparison, but I’m curious if you have any insights into what makes your writing process so fruitful. If someone wanted to improve the way that they performed the activity of writing, what would you tell them?
Kevin: I like that word—“vex”—so I’m going to borrow it for the bad-news part of my answer, which is this: The basic activity of writing is sentence-making. Sentences are vexing. Either you’re willing to take on those vexations or you’re not. If you’re not, you shouldn’t adopt writing as your art form. Overcoming the vexations of a sentence can be pleasurable or engrossing or meditative, and even when it isn’t, it can activate a feeling of compulsion in you, but if making sentences isn’t something you find meaningful, you’re not going to have much luck writing—or at least writing the kind of prose it’s fair to ask other people to read. But that’s mostly a preface to my answer rather than the answer itself. For me, at least, the more I dare myself to address something that truly matters to me, the greater my intrinsic motivation to write. I’m not talking about subjects or experiences or dilemmas that I feel should matter to me—you can’t fake what you care about—but those that actually do. I think the best writing usually emerges out of an attempt to take what’s most precious to you and give it away. If you care so much about something that you’re not willing to falsify it or make a single misstep, even when (like me) you might be couching it in fantasy or conducting odd gymnastic maneuvers around it, you’re much likelier to feel that all the labors of writing are worthwhile. Secondly, there are certain formal challenges that I find motivating, and I can’t be the only one who would. For instance, one section of my novel The Illumination unfolds exclusively (and for most readers invisibly) in ten-word sentences: roughly 13,000 words of text in one ten-word increment after another; never nine words and never eleven. The novel does offer a justification for this, but the justification came after the idea. Writing so many ten-word sentences would alter the rhythms of my prose, I thought—would wrench it in unexpected directions—and, basically, I just wanted to see if I could do it. Finally, I’ve spoken already about how books are often in conversation with other books. But sometimes books are in argument with other books, too, and that can offer its own form of motivation. A few years ago, I wrote a memoir that was about, and confined to, and immersed in, my seventh-grade year of junior high. When it came out, I spoke a lot about the books that had inspired it. I said considerably less about (and never named) the books I felt I was rebutting—my anti-models, as it were—but there were in fact two of them: one memoir that didn’t possess enough rigor in my judgement and another that didn’t possess enough intimacy; in other words, a heap of feelings with no architecture and a work of architecture devoid of feeling. Sometimes, saying no to another book can be just as empowering as saying yes.
Connor: Man oh man—there are a lot of wonderful insights in that answer, and I’d love to pursue them all, but I’ve already taken too much of your time as it is. Before we finish, however, I’d like to be a little self-indulgent and ask you about one of my favorite passages of yours—two sentences from your widely anthologized short story “The Ceiling.” In the beginning of the story, a number of characters are sitting in the narrator’s backyard, watching their children play. A character named Mitch makes a comment about how kids often find new and unexpected ways to play with their toys, and the narrator’s wife, Melissa, responds by saying, “Playing as you should isn’t Fun; it’s Design.” Then, we read these wonderfully simple yet suggestive sentences:
She parted her toes around the front leg of Mitch’s lawn chair. He leaned back into the sunlight and her calf muscles tautened.
I love these sentences because this is such a surprising yet effective way to suggest infidelity. Right now, I’m looking down at my marginalia from when I first read this years ago, and after the word “tautened,” I wrote “cheating?” And I remember how impressed I was when I realized that Melissa was, in fact, having an affair with Mitch, and that you had, somehow, elicited that thought from my brain with a sentence about a woman parting her toes around the leg of a lawn chair. I realize that it has been quite some time since you wrote that story, but finding a detail that is so unassuming and yet so pregnant with meaning is a bit of an obsession of mine, so I was wondering if you had any recollection of how you came up with that image. Do you remember where the idea came from? And how did you know that your readers would catch your meaning?
Kevin: I always hope when I’m writing that people will notice and value moments like that one, so thank you, Connor, for noticing and valuing it. You’re right that it's been a long time since I wrote “The Ceiling”: the summer of 1998, to be precise. I wish I could reveal that I observed someone parting her toes around the leg of someone else’s lawn chair that summer and saw a light bulb go on; it may well have happened; but alas, I don’t remember. The best I can do is tell you a few things, from my current perspective, about why I think the image might be effective. First of all, the opening gestures of a story, when you don’t yet know much about it, maybe only the title and the page count, train you toward a thousand different features: its tone and its rhythms and where it situates itself in relation to reality as we usually understand it and how loving it seems to be toward its characters and toward the world and also toward you as a reader. Make sense of me, make sense of me, make sense of me, it asks, and it asks it more loudly at the beginning than it does anywhere else. The little sublimated body transaction between Melissa and Mitch is the first glimpse we get of her, when we’re still accommodating ourselves to the operations of the story, and because for the moment it’s all we know of her, it’s bound to seem significant. Second, “The Ceiling” in particular follows two tiny signs of trouble as they develop into calamities. As soon as you realize that those calamities are paralleling each other, that both this marriage and this town are undergoing a slow-motion destruction and failing to harbor themselves from it even though they see it coming, you’re bound to think about that early detail and engage in some swift retroactive meaning-making even if its consequence escaped you at first. Finally, and probably a little too personally, I was an unusually late bloomer. When I wrote the story, I had a lifetime’s practice at feeling that the small features of other people’s gestures were soaked in the erotic but were barely accessible to me, except through words. My point is that a gesture such as Melissa’s was already pregnant with meaning for me, and would have been regardless of how the story made use of it. I’ve always thought that there’s a certain element of writing that’s like method acting. If you want to bend your sentences toward a particular emotional charge—not just to describe it but to transmit it—you have to experience that emotion yourself while you’re giving shape to them.
In addition to his latest book, The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories, Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and a memoir of his seventh-grade year called A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He has published his stories in such venues as The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, Tin House, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and New Stories from the South. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. In 2007, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised. You can find him online at kevinbrockmeier.com.
C. Connor Syrewicz holds an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University where he spent two years as the prose editor of the Hayden's Ferry Review. He is currently pursuing a PhD in English at SUNY Albany.